Monday, November 2, 2009

We're Home! Together!!


Our first day back together - Frankfurt


Lunch on the Rhine River - gorgeous vineyards, hills and castles








We stayed in this castle on the Rhine


This one speaks for itself - Rhine river cruise


The castle we stayed in is in the background - Auf Schonburg Castle


Delicious beer!


Strasbourg cathedral


Strasbourg, France


BMW museum - Munich - first snow of the season on this day!

Lowenbrau Bier Garden - Munich

Neuschwanstein Castle


Edelweiss Lodge in the Alps - very cold and snowy!

Partnach Gorge - Garmisch


Hiking the gorge





Vineyards in Freiburg


Our ride home

This is just a sample of the 700 pictures we took on our incredible trip.

October was a whirlwind! I met my man at the Frankfurt airport on the morning of Oct. 8th. It was so wonderful to be back in his arms again. Our 2 weeks in Germany were amazing! We saw tons in Germany and a little bit of France, Austria and Switzerland as well. I loved my first flight in a C-17 on the way home. Travel was easy breezy. As incredible as the trip was, it's so nice to be home with my hubby.

The transition back to reguar married life has been pretty easy, though there were subtle bumps in the road that I noticed and of course, analyzed intensly (If you haven't noticed already, I'm quite a deep thinker - this can be good and bad, but it proves helpful with the lifestyle I currently find myself in.). I've learned a few valuable lessons from this first deployment that I will apply to those in the near future. Most importantly, I have dissolved my unrealistic views of life when we are back together. I had a very construed idea of how life should be now that we face frequent deployments and only have half of every year together. I imagined we would survive the separation periods and then come back together for 3 months of perfect harmony. Obviously, this is not how a normal marriage plays out. However, my logic convinced me that since our time together is limited now, we will never argue or get on each other's nerves when we are together. HA! What a silly idea. So you can imagine the disappointment when we got in a tiff while we were lost and trying to navigate through Germany's crazy streets on our second day of vacation. It took these first few weeks to snap me out of my unhealthy denial and now I'm seeing much more clearly.

Time for dinner with my man. How nice to have company at meal times again!